Ema Destinnová, also known as Emmy Destinn – a woman with a unique voice, incredible temperament and dreamy smile, but also an avid antique collector, spy and psychic. She was a very eccentric lady for her time, one of the first women known to have a tattoo – a bold image on her leg in the form of a snake pointing to her intimate parts. Although she was an oddity to many, she won the whole world over with her voice. She was one of the most important opera singers of the 19th and 20th centuries. I lived for art, I lived for love The same could be said about the singer herself. Although she was rejected several times with claims that she could not sing and was not pretty enough for the opera, it never broke her will. She first received recognition in Berlin in 1898. After that came one invitation after another, and one success after another. London, Vienna, Paris – the whole of Europe was at her feet. In 1908 she was invited to the Metropolitan Opera in New York, and so she set out to conquer the “Met” with her singing. There, at the age of 30, she became the highest paid singer and spent eight glorious seasons (1908-1916) with the company. Performing at the Met became the highlight of her career. Destinn, widely known as the “Divine Emmy”, performed more than eighty operatic roles; her interpretations of Aida, Tosca, and Salome, to name a few of her most famous roles, were considered unsurpassable by all who heard her. However, it was not just the audience that was delighted and enchanted by Emma. At the Metropolitan Opera, she was more than admired by three prominent men of the star-spangled sky – composer Giacomo Puccini, renowned tenor Enrico Caruso and conductor Arturo Toscanini. Toscanini arrived at the Met at the same time as Emmy and long concealed his affection for her. Puccini wrote an opera for Emmy called The Girl from the West. Indeed, it was while preparing the premiere of this opera that his long-standing friendship with Toscanini was torn apart, when both of them showered Emmy with more than mere affection. Caruso loved Emmy and proposed to her several times, but she refused, saying she did not want to marry and that if she ever did, it would be to a Czech. She was a staunch patriot. Although she wanted to live for love like the heroine Tosca, a great requited love was never granted to her. Despite being courted by the most important men of her time, she did not find a man who would be her lifelong support. In her youth, she fell in love with Czech cycling champion Jindřich Vodílek, but he ended the relationship due to his burgeoning career. Emmy took it very hard, and the break-up almost ended in tragedy. A family friend caught her by the braids just before she jumped out a window. It took her some time to recover from this unrequited love, and it wasn’t until New York that she had another serious relationship with baritone Dinh Gilly, who caught her in his arms when she fell off a horse during a rehearsal of The Girl from the West. This relationship was the subject of gossip for a long time, because Dinh was married. Through it all, they stayed together for almost ten years. She did not marry until she was 45. Her husband was indeed Czech, but even this relationship was an unhappy one. The air force lieutenant, 20 years her junior, briskly spent her money, but this wasn’t the only thing that contributed to their estrangement. Emmy’s thoughts kept drifting ever more to her first love, Jindřich. Her lifelong love for him is evidenced by the fact that she wished to have his photograph placed in her coffin. Although she was immensely successful and adored by the public, she returned to war-torn Europe in the 1915-1916 season, against the advice of her friends. Thanks to her contacts with the Czech Resistance, she came into the crosshairs of the Austro-Hungarian secret police, who did not shy away from snooping through her personal mail. She refused to sing for the Austro-Hungarian troops in Prague, and as a consequence was placed under house arrest for two years in the castle in Stráž na Nežárkou. Not even this broke her spirit, however, and she filled this gloomy period of her life by writing, composing and teaching. She had space for her hobbies here, which included fishing and the occult. She had her own “oracle” in the castle and a profound sense of spirituality, having come from a family of healers and occultists, the most famous of whom is the ‘Flying Doctor Kittel’, an alleged wizard from the Jizerské hory (Jizera Mountains). She was reminded of the transience of fame and human life by the skeleton named Ivánek she kept in her bedroom. After the Armistice in 1918, she organised a series of benefit concerts to help alleviate the suffering of her countrymen, and after the establishment of an independent Czechoslovakia, she became one of the most powerful symbols of national liberation, a deeply revered and important figure in Czech history. She died of a stroke in 1930, at the age of 51.